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We have pleasant, clean, fully equipped apartments, complete with linen, chma and kitchenware In the nicer parts of Back Bay and Beacon HIli Home Away, (617) 523-1432 66 Mt. Vernon Street, Boston, Mass. 02108 rowing someone else's will "to reduce him to a state of total subjection," and it was used (liberal Italians would say misused) to describe a kind of psy- chological extortion or incitement. Plagio was taken out of the criminal code in 1981, but it looked like what the prosecution had in mind last year when Verdiglione and his analysts went on trial. The prosecution knew that the patients Forno had inter- viewed-including five whom he per- suaded to press charges along with Calderoni-might be less credible as witnesses than their analysts, and even less credible than Armando Verdi- glione. The one thing in their favor was the possibility that psychoanalysis had made them that way. V ERDIGLIONE did a lot of writing about his trial. There were his three tracts, and then there was a se- ries of special issues of Spirali-it is now Spirali del Secondo Rinascimento. Those issues were bordered in gray, like mourning testimonials, and they included one issue Verdiglione called "Musatti and the Monster of Flor- ence," which was an attack on the old analyst who had dressed him down for fraud twenty years ago. Sometimes it seemed as if V erdiglione blamed Musatti for the trial. Sometimes he blamed "Milanese corporatism" (be- cause people in Milan didn't under- stand that private capital was re- sponsible for all the great Italian adventures, from Christopher Colum- bus's voyages to his own) and some- times "Milanese Calvinism" (because people in Milan were "critics of the probable"). Mostly, though, he blamed Milanese Communism-which was odd, considering that Milan has been a Socialist town for eighteen years. He said that the rea] power here was Communist. He said that Piero Forno was a Communist, and that the judges were Communists, and that Giorgio Bocca and all the other columnists and reporters covering his trial were Communists, and that the expert witnesses in the trial-two psy- chiatrists and an anthropologist- were Communists. (Elie Wiesel told Verdiglione that it was an "honor" to be attacked by the Communist Party.) Finally, even one of his own lawyers was exasperated. The lawyer says now that one of the three experts is a Com- munist, but then so is one of every three Italians. Verdiglione got four and a half years. He was in jail in San Vittore until the end of July, and then con- JUNE 8,1987 fined to his apartment, and he took it as "a symbol of the sickness of the civilization" when Giovanni Pescar- zoli, who was the presiding judge at his trial, refused to let him telephone Ionesco to discuss proofs. (The judge said that calling up Ionesco would un- dermine "the reëducative function" of the sentence.) In February, the Court of Appeals basically confirmed that sentence, and then, in a gesture that only the Milanese seemed to under- stand, expanded Verdiglione's house arrest to include the whole country- which amounted to provisional liberty. It may be that by February the Mila- nese were finally finished with Arman- do Verdiglione. Nobody here cared where he went or whom he called, and soon the only place besides Spirali where you could read about the Ver- diglione affair was in the French papers. Some of the French writers he used to publish bought a page in Le M onde to tell the President of Italy that they were "Pour Armando Verdi- glione." (Bernard-Henri Lévy, who had called the "persecution" of Ar- mando Verdiglione a battle in the war between the "cosmopolitans" and the "totalitarians," thought up the ap- peal.) They pointed out that anyone smart enough to have published them was clearly a lover of freedom and an editor of great talent, not to mention a contributor to "la qualité du dialogue Franco-Italien." They talked about "moral lynching," and how V erdi- glione's only crime was his indepen- dence from "the machines that control and share the politico-ideological life of Italy." Six weeks after the appeal ran, Verdiglione was in Rome at a Radical Party convention. He had decided to join the Radicali, like Toni Negri, who had discovered the Party after four years in j ail on "pretrial de- tention." Negri was elected to Mon- tecitorio as a Radical deputy and freed with parliamentary immunity-and got on a plane for Paris. Verdiglione did not mention Negri. He talked about his friend Enzo Tortora, a television talk-show host who had also been "persecuted" by the courts- for drug and arms dealing for the Mafia. Tortora had got ten years to Verdiglione's four and a half, but he was out in less than a year, and by then he had also discovered the Radi- cali, who put him on their secretariat, with (among others) the orange per- son and a terrorist pentito. The Radi- cali got Tortora elected to the Euro- pean Parliament, and he has diplo- matic immunity-which may be what